The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Sports seems to bring out the best in our greatest writers. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the inherent drama in sports (which can have a time-transporting effect—I felt like a 10-year-old boy again while watching the end of this year’s Iron Bowl) and the friction caused by the fact that these sports “heroes” who are treated like gods are in fact mere mortals like the rest of us

Gay Talese (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I devour great prose about sports, and will read the same piece sometimes dozens of times, in an attempt to learn more about the craft and, frankly, to be entertained. Great writing is one of the world’s last great turn-ons.

Here are five of my favorite scenes/lines from pieces of sports writing that I return to year after year:

(Wallace was a great essayist and novelist, and was especially good on tennis, a sport he played competitively at the youth level.)

A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game—as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or—as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject—to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

(Here Talese describes a scene from the wayward marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.)

He was then 39, she was 27. They had been married in January of that year, 1954, despite disharmony in temperament and time; he was tired of publicity, she was thriving on it; he was intolerant of tardiness, she was always late. During their honeymoon in Tokyo an American general had introduced himself and asked if, as a patriotic gesture, she would visit the troops in Korea. She looked at Joe. 'It's your honeymoon,' he said, shrugging, 'go ahead if you want to.'

She appeared on 10 occasions before 100,000 servicemen, and when she returned, she said, 'It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.'

(This is fiction and not a book about sports, but one of McCarthy’s enduring characters, the Judge, nails the essence of our attraction to games and sports.)

Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game in not inherent in the game itself but rather in value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

(This piece was published just this year. Frazier has become one of my favorite prose stylists. This story is constructed with many perfect little descriptive moments like this one.)

Casting for steelhead is like calling God on the telephone, and it rings and rings and rings, hundreds of rings, a thousand rings, and you listen to each ring as if an answer might come at any moment, but no answer comes, and no answer comes, and then on the 1,001st ring, or the 1,047th ring, God loses his patience and picks up the phone and yells, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU CALLING ME FOR?” in a voice the size of the canyon. You would fall to your knees if you weren’t chest-deep in water and afraid that the rocketing, leaping creature you have somehow tied into will get away.